I’ve heard several iPhone artists talk about how eager they were to see the new Layers painting app for the iPhone – and today it has hit the App Store.
Layers appears to offer some powerful features, and looks very promising. It’s described as a ‘…natural media painting app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Built on the feedback of hundreds of mobile artists.
Here are some of the notable features of the app:
- Allows you to add up to five layers to each drawing
- You can add a layer from a photo to trace your subject, or use the eraser tool to remove parts of one layer and reveal details of the layer beneath
- Full-featured eraser gives you fine-grained control over layer transparency
- You can email your drawing as a PSD file with the layers intact
- Two fingered pan and zoom
- Eight high-quality brushes
- Generous undo history that is saved on exit
- Email as JPG or PSD with layers intact
- Replay drawings using Mac OS X viewer
Our good friend Corliss Blakely (who also created our lovely site banner) was one of those very eagerly awaiting this app’s release, and she is already very fond of it:
I got up at 3:30 in the morning to download the app. I love it and can hardly wait until I have some time to really start painting with it. These first paintings were exploring how to use the app. It has moved to the top of the list for painting apps.
And here is an example of Corliss’ early work with Layers:
I look forward to seeing more work with Layers, and imagine this app may be a big hit. You can find it in the App Store now, priced at $4.99.
I’ve also just discovered that Layers has a great web site, with lots more info about the app, and some ‘back story’ info that’s also well worth a look – as the app is developed by a computer engineering student at Vanderbilt University. Give that a look HERE.
We’d also love to hear your thoughts on this app, if you’ve tried it out – and to see your work with it!
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After seeing this on your sister site and on TUAW this afternoon I had to download it and give it a try. I’m really familiar with Brushes! and was a beta-tester for it’s second iteration, and I also use Colors, Zeus Draw and have tried a number of other art apps. So, I was excited to try out Layers.
On the iPhone it’s amazing. The brush selection and application of “paint” is very well implemented, and it’s really responsive. The best feature is its namesake, of course, the ability to use layers while painting. You can load images from your camera roll or photo library and manipulate them, paint on them, or just use them as a guide to paint freestyle on layers above them. This is a great feature.
There are a few drawbacks, though. First, is placement of the images from your camera. (If you’re not going to use this feature, you can ignore this issue entirely.) If you’re importing an image, more times than not it will not properly import. It distorts, rotates, zooms into some strange area of the image (randomly, it seems), or stretches the image beyond recognition. I found that if I cropped the image I want to use to a square aspect ratio using Photogene first, Layers seems to handle the image just fine.
Second is that the companion app for the Mac doesn’t really work well. It’s designed to allow you to “play back” the painting and render it out as an animation or as a larger still image — much like Brushes! companion Brushes Viewer application does on the Mac. The problem is that with several attempts, I was unable to get it to successfully render. The animation plays with strange artifacts — green pixels along edges of strokes. Attempting to export larger resolution still images — vital if this is to gain the kind of recognition in print that Brushes! has gained — just caused the program spit out an error message, saying that it couldn’t find the necessary .data file. The companion application was able to render a “full size” still without issue, but that’s too small to be useful.
I think these two issues are probably going to be fairly easy to solve (though I’m not a coder at all, so what do I know?). But even with them, the painting experience on the iPhone is fabulous. Once the export issues are resolved, this app is an absolute contender for the most useful and fun painting app on the phone.
SFDex – thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and findings. Like you, I hope those issues can be quickly resolved via an update.
The Layers Replay Viewer has already been updated to version 1.0.3 on the Layers website and now works fine for the images I’ve tried it with (I’ve exported both movies and higher resolution images).